Finding The Needle In The Haystack: How BioSig-ID Forensic Tools Catch The 2 Types Of Fraud

Finding The Needle In The Haystack: How BioSig-ID Forensic Tools Catch The 2 Types Of Fraud

Online Fraud Protection – What is it?

Fraud using the “virtual highway” is big business with data breaches costing $6.2B in 2016 and financial student aid fraud (FSAF) costing upwards of $6.0B annually. Online fraud protection is not optional. But how do you go about it?

There are at least two types of common internet or device-based fraud:

Having your enterprise hacked for direct theft. These criminals enter your enterprise network (usually through a weak password related hack) and steal valuable information that can be used for ransomware, reselling of IP, emptying bank accounts and more.

Let’s look at scenarios in different sectors to understand the impact.

Higher Education

Online learning environments is a criminal paradise. The learning management system’s virtual nature makes it highly vulnerable to direct theft. The most common crime is students (real and fictitious) who engage in student financial aid fraud – estimated to be up to 8.12% of all the FSA your institution dispenses. To put this in perspective, say your school disburses $50M in FSA annually. The feds suggest 8.12% of that is “improperly paid.” Using this math, it means up to $4,000,000+ must be paid back to the Dept. of Education for students who don’t complete…and the school is left to try and collect these monies from the student. Good luck.

Enterprise Breaches

Bad actors seek the data you hold on all your clients/users. Online fraud protection is critical. Data breaches are commonplace and costly; we read about them every day. External threats from various hackings and internal threats from vendors and employees are the main reasons why breaches occur.

Most of the companies who are breached end up paying recovery costs at $158.00 per breached record. Healthcare records are even more expensive and can cost up to $394.00 each. This adds up to millions of dollars. A massive breach with recovery costs and potential lawsuits will affect share prices and can create long term trust problems with users. The disclosure last year by Yahoo! of two massive user-data breaches (1.5B) in 2013 and 2014 led Verizon to lop $350 million from the purchase price for Yahoo’s internet businesses.

Finding the origin of fraud is like trying to find a needle in a haystack and fraudsters know it. One of the many reasons that fraud is committed is because it’s hard to catch the perpetrator. With fraud growing at an alarming rate, many bad actors slip through the cracks. I.T. teams can consult their logs to try and reconstruct what happened but in most cases this forensic approach can take many months, often delaying a breach announcement to understand the scope of the problem.

What if there was some way of combing through all the raw data, pinpointing fraudsters and recovering lost money?

Fortunately, there is. Fraud prevention is an ecosystem. It begins at the front door of every network when users enter the system with a username and password. This is the single most vulnerable point of entry. Every network must authenticate its users, not just okay the credentials. Authentication is knowing who is behind the keyboard. Anyone can type the right information. The hard part is understanding whether it’s the rightful user.

Stage one of online fraud prevention

Properly authenticating users at login

Use Multi-factor authentication the gold standard

But what happens once they enter and can roam? It’s critical to use anti-fraud detection tools that can identify potential fraud minded users through atypical behaviors

These tools should provide real-time warnings that something is wrong so administrators can review the situation and take appropriate steps

Forensics should quickly reconstruct the intrusion/breach and identify the perpetrator

Quick analysis makes it easier to determine what assets were touched by this individual and the extent of the damage

BioSig-ID is one solution that comes pre-loaded with tools to tackle each part of online fraud protection. First, it stops potential imposters at login with biometric identification using a revolutionary drawn password. For those who require higher level assurance BioProof-ID is ideal as document verifier. In all cases, BioSig-ID authenticates users with multi-factor technology. It’s not enough to know your BioSig-ID password – an imposter would still have to draw it exactly as the regular user does to gain network access (good luck). BioSig-ID offers a web-based contest to duplicate a password – Mom. They show how it looks yet with 19,000 users have failed to duplicate how it was written.

But say a threat comes from the inside, notably breached by a third-party vendor with access. In this scenario, BioSig-ID can monitor hundreds of thousands of activities in its usage. These reporting tools provide backend details on how the user is accessing assets, from device to geolocation, to time of day or number of password resets. It digests all this data, reviews historical patterns and analyzes the likelihood of fraud. BioSig-ID takes all the guesswork out of finding fraud.

Once in use, BioSig-ID forensics system knows exactly who users are. It can track many factors from login patterns and attempts to activity and success rates. BioSig-ID finds the anomalies that could never be detected by an individual, or even a dedicated fraud prevention team and provides alerts in real-time. Once the bad actors are found, clients can handle it from there, taking whatever action they deem necessary.

The BioSig-ID forensics are derived by validations of the unique gesture biometric passwords when logging in to a device or virtual asset. After years of use in 95 countries and 14 million uses, BioSig-ID has significant data and power to filter out the bad actors. Our state-of-the-art analytics tool has become fine-tuned in pattern analysis used to find academic fraud, access to your device or account fraud and financial fraud. The forensics have caught 1,000’s of bad actors for our clients.

Life’s too short to be chasing fraudsters. Let BioSig-ID’s fraud buster forensic tool help you find the needle in the haystack, so you don’t have to.